


got you stuck on my body like a tattoo

by delightfulalot



Series: Love is a Four Letter Word [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-09
Updated: 2012-12-09
Packaged: 2017-11-20 17:03:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/587703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delightfulalot/pseuds/delightfulalot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of how Clint seduced his handler (and accidentally fell in love) and then brought in a dangerous underage assassin as a new recruit (and then fell in love again) and everything that happened after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	got you stuck on my body like a tattoo

**Author's Note:**

> This is a companion to my Natasha piece, though you don't need to read that one to read this one. I originally expected this to be around 6K words and meant to post in late June/early July. I was an idiot. Movie-compliant; begins about a decade pre-Avengers and moves along from there. I don't have a LOT of comics-knowledge, so the backstory might be a little muddled but I think it works. Title is from "One More Night" by Maroon 5.

The first time Clint gets drunk with Phil they're still on a last name basis.  

They're both sprawled all over the couch in Phil's office after a pretty run-of-the-mill mission. Clint makes some dumb joke about what's under Fury's eyepatch, speculating that it's tentacles or an extra arm or something, and Phil shakes his head and says, "Jesus Christ, Barton," which wouldn't be that remarkable - it's basically his default Clint saying - except now he's saying it with more fondness than annoyance, a laugh rather than a sigh. He follows it up with, "Are you high?" 

Clint grins, wide and cocky. "No. But I can be." 

Phil shakes his head again. "You know I'm your superior, right? I'm meant to keep you on the straight and narrow." 

Clint leans close. Phil, maybe unconsciously, mirrors him, moving so they are only a few inches apart. His breath stutters, and his eyes quickly flick to Clint's lips and then back up to match his gaze. 

"Then you probably shouldn't have invited me to your office for a drink, sir." 

"Fuck you, Barton," he says as he moves back into his own space, his grin loose and happy, and Clint's dick twitches. Oh. _Oh,_ he thinks, getting an idea. He's enjoying this side of the normally buttoned up agent, and he thinks he'd like to see more, get his _hands_ on more. Clint smirks, and makes sure to keep eye contact with Phil. 

"All you have to do is ask, sir." 

"Oh, is that all I have to do?" Phil says, moving back towards Clint with this _glint_ in his eye that practically makes Clint stand at attention. He barely has time to wrap his mind around the fact that _this is happening_ before Phil's lips are on his, before Phil's nipping at his bottom lip with his teeth, before Phil's tongue is in his mouth. He tastes like the cheap beer they've been swilling and smoke ( _where the hell did that come from?_ ) and something indescribable, like joy or delight or something like it. Clint leans into the kiss, his hand coming to rest on Phil's chest, feeling his heartbeat quicken. Phil's hand goes to Clint's cheek before dropping and gathering his shirt in a fist. As the bottom edge of Clint's t-shirt lifts up, Phil's other hand slides in, cool and damp from his beer on Clint's warm stomach, making Clint hiss and pull back. Phil looks at him with half-lidded eyes, lips swollen. He drops Clint's shirt but keeps his other hand under it, trailing it slowly across Clint's abs.

 "Did I do something wrong?" Phil asks, and Clint tries not to stutter as his hand continues to move, this time heading lower. 

Clint tries to say something, but then Phil's fingers are undoing the button on his jeans, and so he just shakes his head and leans back towards Phil, both hands going to his face as he kisses him again. Phil grabs Clint's shirt again, only this time he uses it to pull Clint onto his lap, set so he's straddling him, never breaking the kiss. Clint's concentrating on unbuttoning Phil's shirt while keeping their mouths together, so he doesn't realize how low Phil's hand has traveled until he feels it brushing against his cock. He huffs a note of surprise into Phil's mouth, and Phil grins, nips Clint's bottom lip and grabs a hold of Clint's erection. 

"You like that, Barton?" he asks. 

"Clint," he breathes into the side of Phil's face. "Call me Clint." 

"Clint," Phil says softly into Clint's mouth, his hand stroking Clint's dick, his thumb swiping over the head, and Clint honestly doesn't think he's ever been this turned on before - he hadn't realized he was so self-centered. 

Clint gets back to trying to get his hands on Phil, pulls his button-down out of his pants and finishes unbuttoning it. He slides his hands under it, hoping to finally get his hands on some skin, only to be met by a thin cotton shirt. Clint pulls away and looks Phil directly in the eyes, though Phil looks dazed.

"Really, sir? You're wearing an undershirt?"

It takes Phil a second, but then he grins. 

"It's the uniform," he says, shrugging. "Here, let me." He pulls his hand out of Clint's pants - Clint responds by making a very attractive whining noise, if the glare Phil shoots him is any indication - and then strips out of both shirts. Clint runs his hands down Phil's arms, then moves to his stomach. He leans back in to kiss Phil again, sliding his hands up Phil's back, moving his hips in Phil's lap. Phil takes the hint, slips his hand back into Clint's pants and his tongue into Clint's mouth at the same time. Clint moans into Phil's mouth, and Phil twists, just slightly, and swipes his thumb over the head of Clint's cock again, and Clint gasps, breaking the kiss, knocking their foreheads together when he thrusts into Phil's hand. Phil laughs, his other hand coming up to rub the sore spot on his temple. Clint grins, shaky, not quite as full of confidence and swagger as his normal grin, and Phil kisses the corner of his mouth and moves his hips, rubbing his own erection against Clint's ass through their clothes, and Clint jumps, slightly, and comes in Phil's hand. 

It's Phil's turn to grin, wiping his hand with tissues from a box nearby. "Was that good for you, Clint?"

"Sir, yes sir," he gasps, out of breath. Phil laughs.

"I think, after that, you can call me Phil." 

Clint laughs, too, and drops his head onto Phil's shoulder, breathing into the space where it meets his neck. He wraps both hands around Phil's upper arms, and turns his head the other way, so his hair tickles under Phil's chin. He notices what looks like a tattoo under his hand, so he slides it down until it's cradling Phil's elbow and takes a look at what's on his bicep. 

"Is that - is that a Captain America shield?" 

-

They don't talk about it, but after the next mission and debrief Clint finds himself back in Phil's office, on Phil's couch, his uniform strewn on the floor, with Phil's suit alongside it and Phil's body entwined with his. 

They still don't talk about it, call each other by last names and code names in the presence of other people, but Clint feels a lot happier, his smile is a little closer to the surface, and Phil is exactly the same as always - except for the softness in his gaze that Clint only sees because he's looking for it. 

They don't talk about it, and nothing changes.

At least on the surface. 

-

Clint spends his first six hours in Moscow always a step behind his target, Phil's intel being just the tiniest bit wrong, before he announces he's going radio silent and clicks his communicator off. He'd spotted a flash of red hair disappearing around a corner just a second ago, and he makes his way across the rooftops towards it. He spots the flash of red again, and again, just out of reach, before finally catching up to her and moving parallel to her on the ground. 

The first thing that really strikes him when he sees Natasha Romanoff fully is how damn _young_ she looks. He'd studied her kill list and pertinent parts of her file on the way over, and though Phil had mentioned she was young, he'd been expecting someone closer to his age - 25 at least. Romanoff looks barely old enough to buy alcohol, if that. Still, his mission is to take her down, so he keeps an eye on her, hoping to catch her in the act before shooting her. 

He's ziplining across a wide alley when she disappears. 

"Shit," he mutters under his breath. He looks around frantically and is about to turn his comm back on when he spots her in the alley. A bear of a man has hold of her, his forearm around her throat, and without thinking Clint loads an arrow and aims at the guy's hand. Before he can release, though, she's in front of him, blocking his blows almost - but not quite - before he throws them. It's beautiful, gorgeous technique, entirely defensive, and Clint essentially forgets that he is here to take Romanoff out.

After a minute, he notices she's lagging, about to be beaten, and he lets his arrow fly. 

" _Shit_ ," he mutters again - this time with feeling - when the body drops. That's pretty much exactly the opposite of what this mission was supposed to be. He shimmies down the side of the building until he's close enough to leap to the ground behind the body. When he stands up, Romanoff is threatening him with his own arrow. Her face is hard, like anyone with her kill list would be, but her edges are soft, childlike, and he makes the decision right there to take her in, this little girl of a spy. 

-

Clint loves television. It's basically been the only constant in his life. Even now, even while on missions, he tries to find _Cheers_ or _Friends_ or _I Love Lucy_ playing somewhere: in his hotel room when he gets one, or in a bar close to closing time, or through the windows of other buildings when he's perched on roofs. He always manages to find them, too, or some other sitcom. 

His favorite show when he was a kid, embarrassingly enough, was _My Little Pony_. He only saw an episode or two, but he'd had his own My Little Pony dolls in the orphanage, handed down from an older girl, and he didn't give a fuck if they were pink and purple and _girly_ , according to Barney; as a matter of fact, he took the purple one when he split, because he'd always kind of liked purple and he'd fallen in love with his little colorful horses. The two loves of his life (for most of his life, at least) were horses and archery. The first time he got to shoot an arrow from the back of a horse he just about exploded with excitement. 

So when he mentions _My Little Pony_ to Romanoff and only gets a blank look in return, there's basically nothing he can do except call up his DVD guy and get a disc delivered to the plane before they get there.

(He doesn't know where the DVD guy came from; all he knows is that one time he made a comment about how he wanted to watch _The Monkees_ because he couldn't really remember but he thought they'd been pretty catchy, and later that day he had a stack of tapes on his VCR in his room. He'd tried it out a few more times, with other ridiculous 60s sitcoms ( _Petticoat Junction_ , _The Flying Nun_ ), and then he'd asked for _Cop Rock_ , and _St. Elsewhere_ , and then there was a note stuck in one of his mission folders that just said _Call this number when you want a damn TV show and stop telling me about them_. Fury'd shot him a look when he'd picked up the note, but Clint followed orders and called the number and stopped mentioning anything around Fury, and the TV shows kept showing up. They'd switched over to DVDs a few months ago; Clint likes them better, as they're less bulky and don't wear out as quickly.)

Romanoff, besides being a child spy, has also apparently never seen an episode of an American television show in her _life_ , which Clint finds appalling enough to be bordering on child abuse (the "spy" thing doesn't help either), so Clint has a DVD player delivered to her room the day after she gets assigned one. He brings her discs of random episodes from all kinds of genres, and he might have more of an interest than she does, but she never kicks him out of her room. She's always ready to curl up next to him, tucking into the side of his body and making herself look as young as she actually is. 

He always gets very into whatever he's watching, even if he's seen it a million times before, so he doesn't always notice when Romanoff - or Natasha, really - falls asleep against him. The first time it happens, he gives a start when she lets out the tiniest of snores and kind of stares at her in wonder while she sleeps. He starts feeling great rushes of emotion every time he sees her, and he thinks a little bit this must be what it feels like to be a big brother (and he tries not to think of his own big brother when that happens; he tries to focus on this little girl in his arms, tries to be the big brother he never had).

He tells Phil once, and then again, and then he's spending their post-debrief sessions talking all about Natasha, and what she said, and how she's improving when they spar, and how she's coming out of her shell, like last week she got really invested in an episode of _Dawson's Creek_ , and - 

Phil covers Clint's mouth with his hand, and just raises his eyebrows at Clint's little noise of indignation. 

"Does now _really_ seem like the best time?" he asks, and, true, they're at Phil's apartment, on Phil's couch, and Clint has his hands under Phil's shirt. Clint grins under Phil's hand and darts his tongue out. Phil pulls his hand away, a little smirk on his face. 

"I guess you're right," Clint says, leaning forward to kiss him quickly. "But seriously, she's pretty great."

Phil frowns. "Do you think you're getting a little too...attached?" 

Clint pauses and thinks about it. "No?"

"So, yes." 

"Actually, I said the opposite of that."

"No, you asked the opposite of that," and he moves away, far enough that Clint's hands slip from their spot on his torso. Clint sighs. "I'm only saying this for your own protection," Phil continues, "because you're her handler, not her best friend or her brother or her boyfriend. Her _handler_." 

"You're one to talk," Clint says, leaning towards Phil, who stays exactly where he is and lets Clint nuzzle his neck. 

"I know," he says softly, his arms seemingly wrapping around Clint of their own volition. "That just means I know what I'm talking about." 

Clint cups Phil's cheek in one hand and looks directly into his eyes. "Hey. I'm here, I'm okay. I'm not going anywhere." 

Phil wraps his hand around Clint's wrist and nods.

It becomes their mantra after harrowing missions, something Clint gets used to saying anytime they're alone. It should lose its meaning but it doesn't; it just starts to take on a different one as their relationship stretches out, changes shape. 

-

Clint lets it slip that he was supposed to kill Natasha, _to_ Natasha, and when she stops really talking to him, and hanging around him after debriefs, and doesn't answer her door when he knocks, he curls up on the couch in Phil's office and gets stinking drunk. 

"I told you not to get attached," Phil says, _the traitor_ , without even looking up from his paperwork. 

"She wanted to be an agent! And now she's an agent!" Clint says, or tries to say, but he's got his face pressed into a cushion and he's pretty sure all that comes out is "Gen!" in indignant tones. 

"Don't worry about it. No one can stay mad at you for too long." 

Clint doesn't say anything, just waves a hand vaguely in Phil's direction. He's misjudged how drunk he is, though, and ends up spilling off the couch, knocking his beer over and sprawling face down on the spreading puddle. _That_ finally gets Phil to look up, and he runs over and starts moving boxes from the floor onto the couch. 

"Goddammit, Barton," he says, and it barely holds any of the affection Clint's used to. 

"I'm sorry," Clint says sadly. "I guess I can't do anything right." He sighs, and his breath makes the beer under his cheek move a little. 

Phil sighs, too, and runs one hand over Clint's back. "Natasha'll come around. Just give her time." 

A towel suddenly appears in front of Clint's face, and so he sits up and wipes his cheek off and then half-heartedly rubs it down the front of his shirt, but he's still sitting in the puddle, and basically soaked to the skin with beer. Phil's sitting on the couch, surrounded by boxes, and he shakes his head when Clint peels his shirt away from his body only to have it immediately stick to him when he lets it go. The corners of Phil's mouth are pointed a little bit more towards the ceiling than they were a second ago. If Clint were in a better mood, he'd swat Phil for laughing at him, or answer his smile with one of his own, but as it is he can barely scoot forward enough to set his forehead on Phil's knees. 

"C'mon, Drunk-eye," Phil says, standing and pulling Clint to his feet as well. "I'll take you home." 

Clint nods into Phil's shoulder, and they go to Phil's ( _their_ ) apartment, where Clint takes a shower with his shampoo, grabs clothes out of his drawer (though he does pull on one of Phil's t-shirts, worn soft and still smelling of his cologne), and collapses on his side of the bed. He turns off his light and curls into Phil, closes his eyes against the soft light from Phil's lamp and listens to his pen scratching on his paperwork. 

"This must be what love feels like," he murmurs. He's not sure if Phil's heard him, or if he even said it out loud, but then the pen stops moving. Phil brushes a hand through Clint's hair and kisses his forehead. 

"Yeah," he says softly, his voice so full of warm affection that Clint feels like wrapping it around himself like a blanket. "It is." 

Clint smiles sleepily and drifts off. 

-

Natasha starts talking to him again before too long, but it's three weeks before she'll answer to anything but Agent Romanoff, and another month before she'll answer to Nat, his nickname for her. Clint gets it, at least the agent thing - he'd wanted it almost as badly as she did, couldn't believe it when people started calling him Agent Barton and not just Hawkeye or Clint or You There. 

So he calls her Agent Romanoff, and Agent Natasha, and Agent Nat, and once they're almost back to normal - once she's sparring with him without an evil look in her eye - he makes her a small label that says "Agent Gnat" and sticks it on the inside collar of her uniform. She wears it on a mission and doesn't notice it until she gets back, at which point she punches Clint so hard in the arm there's a bruise for a week. 

After that, though, they're completely back to normal, lounging on Nat's bed together and working their way through 90s sitcoms. They're in the middle of an episode of _Mad About You_ , the one where Paul's old apartment is leased by Kramer from _Seinfeld_ , when she asks, "Do you have an apartment off-base?"

Clint jumps a little - he'd thought she was asleep - and then realizes what she said and freezes. He _does_ have an apartment off-base, but he shares it with Phil - they put Clint's name on the lease just last week, and it's the first place he's had that's actually _his_ , or at least part his. Clint was so excited that he let Phil fuck him, slow, on the kitchen floor, and then they had ice cream from their freezer still curled around each other on the tile and made jokes over who was going to clean up. Nat, though, still calls Phil "Coulson," doesn't know about their relationship and isn't supposed to, so it's not like he can tell her. 

"I...used to," he finally says slowly, which is technically true; SHIELD had purchased one for him after one too many complaints about him dropping out of the rafters on base and scaring people. It hadn't ever felt like his, though.

"So you have a room here?"

"Yes." Which, again, is _technically_ true, though he hasn't set foot in it for at least two years. 

"Why don't we ever hang out there?" The last word is stretched out into a yawn. 

"Uh, because it's gross and messy?" 

It sounds weak even to his ears. She makes a little humming noise, and he's probably paranoid but he thinks she sounds suspicious, so he hastens to add, "Besides, you've got a bigger TV." 

"Oh." She falls quiet again. Onscreen, Kramer says "I'll mind the past and you _giddy-up_ to the future," and Nat lets out a breathy laugh when the studio audience does, watching Kramer mess around. 

"Can I get an apartment?" she asks as Paul heads back to the new apartment he shares with Jamie. 

"Yeah. Oh, yeah!" Clint says, maybe a little too excited, but he's just so relieved they're off the subject of his place. "Yeah, I don't have one 'cause it seemed like a waste, I'm always here or on a mission, but I totally understand the need to get out of here. I'll ask Coulson about it tomorrow."

"Great," she says, and by the time the next episode has started, she's fast asleep. 

-

Clint goes on a mission and while he's gone Phil gives Natasha an undercover long-term assignment, _just because she asked_ , and it only takes two weeks before Clint starts missing her so much it aches. 

"But _why_ did you have to send her?" he whines one particular day, draped over Phil's couch in his uniform, not even sore from his sparring match with a random SHIELD agent. 

Phil sighs and looks up from his paperwork. "I sent her because she needed something to do, she's extremely qualified, and she asked to go. Just like I've told you every other time you've asked. Now please, can I do my work without being interrupted?" 

Clint frowns but keeps quiet. He picks an arrow out of his quiver on the floor and starts unscrewing the head. It's a new set, just back from R&D, and he's been told they have detonators. He doesn't know a lot about explosives, but he's curious to see what it looks like. He's sticking a finger in to poke a particularly interesting wire when Phil snatches it out of his hand. Clint expects a lecture but instead he fiddles with the piece himself, looking, for some reason, nervous. 

Clint sits up, and Phil perches himself on the very edge of the couch on the absolute other end. For a few moments, he stares at the floor. Clint reaches out and gently takes his arrowhead back, and that's when Phil turns to look at him, giving him a searching look Clint hasn't seen in years, since before Phil figured Clint out. 

"Do you have feelings for Natasha?" he asks finally, sounding like he knows the answer and he's just dreading it being confirmed. 

Clint, on the other hand, has _no idea_ about any of it - what his relationship with Natasha even is, where this question is coming from, what Phil is thinking - and it's that last thing that throws him off so much, after years of figuring out everything that made Phil Coulson tick, being able to read absolute contentment in the littlest quirk of the lips. This nervous version of Phil, with his heart essentially on his sleeve, is a complete mystery to him. 

"It's okay if you do," Phil finally says, his gaze dropping back to the floor.

"No!" The only thing Clint knows for sure is that he doesn't like this look on Phil's face, the defeated slump of his shoulders. 

"I mean," he continues when Phil looks at him again, "I don't...I don't really know how I feel about her. Work wise, she's absolutely the best partner I've ever had, and I love hanging out with her. She's so young, though, in a lot of ways. And also not." 

Oh, Clint hates himself right now, hates the sad downturn of Phil's eyes, hates the way he put that there by _thinking out loud_ , having no idea what he's talking about, _again_. He takes a moment to put his thoughts in order, lets out a big breath when he thinks he has it. 

"Honest opinion?" 

Phil nods. 

"All I know for sure is I miss her like a limb." 

Phil takes a beat, looking away from Clint, staring into space, and then says, "Okay," very business-like, sounding like normal Phil. He goes back to his desk and returns to his paperwork. 

Clint has no idea what just happened or what any of it _means_ ; all he knows is he needs to get out of this suddenly claustrophobic room.

"I'll, uh, I'll see you at home, huh?" he asks as he hustles himself out, getting a distracted nod in return. 

That night, for the first time ever, Clint is long asleep before Phil even makes it home. 

-

Clint finds Phil sitting on the fire escape, smoking. He drops down next to him, snags the cigarette from his hand, and takes a long drag. It burns his throat and he struggles not to cough - he never so much as held a cigarette before he started sleeping with Phil. 

"I thought you didn't smoke," Phil says, watching Clint's mouth with a sad look in his eyes as Clint takes another drag. 

"I thought you quit," Clint shoots back, the words falling out of his mouth in a haze of smoke, a little angry, suddenly, because he hasn't seen a cigarette since last year, when Phil got a little too winded while sparring, woke up in the middle of the night and coughed a little too hard. 

"I did," Phil says, but he reaches out and takes the cigarette back anyway. "I bought this pack a couple of weeks ago."

And then, it clicks. Phil bought the pack the same night he asked Clint about Natasha, the same night Clint rambled on for far too long about feelings he may or may not have. He ducks his head, turns away from Phil, watches someone through a window four buildings away. She's dancing, her arms making long sweeping movements that remind him of Natasha fighting, smooth and graceful. She stops dancing, suddenly, and then someone's behind her and she's throwing her arms around him, and Clint _aches_ with longing, both for his best friend on a mission and the man sitting right next to him who feels like he's a million miles away. 

"I miss you," Clint says, so quietly that Phil says, "Excuse me?" 

Clint clears his throat and starts over. "I miss _you_ like a phantom limb, too, you know. I just...don't spend that much time away from you. But when I do, I ache. This, actually, this whole hardly talking thing, this is making me miss you almost as much as I miss Natasha. You're here but you're not _present_ , and all I really want is to go back to normal."

"I don't think it can, though, not if something's changed." 

Clint sighs. "Nothing's changed, not between us. My feelings for you have literally never diminished, Phil. And maybe 'normal' wasn't the right word, because nothing about this is normal. We finally got together when you gave me a handjob while we were both drunk; nothing about this is normal." 

"You said that already." 

"I mean it. Look, I don't really know how I feel about Nat. She's the best partner I've ever worked with in the field, I've never liked sparring with someone more, and sure, she's attractive, and if I weren't in love with you I probably would have already tried to sleep with her and she probably would have tried to kill me. But I _am_ in love with you, have been for years, and even if you were never exactly what I imagined wanting, you are exactly what I want and exactly what I need. Forever, always, the end, you're _it_ for me." 

Phil's silent for a minute, and Clint starts getting nervous, almost entirely sure that he's fucked everything up again, but then he looks at Phil and sees the edges of his mouth quirking up. 

"You ache for me?" he asks, and Clint can hear the laughter in his voice and knows they're going to be okay. He nudges Phil's shoulder with his own and says, "I burn, I pine, I perish." 

"That serious, huh?" 

"That serious." 

Phil stands, only groaning a little, and then holds out his hand for Clint's. Clint isn't expecting to be pulled to his feet, but Phil tugs so hard that Clint stumbles into him for a second, his free hand colliding with Phil's chest, and then they're kissing, and he tastes like smoke and relief and everything about him is so familiar that he almost wants to cry. 

They keep holding on to each other as they stumble back into the apartment, back into their room, hands and mouths roaming over skin, and they fall into bed and tear off clothes and then slow down, all caresses and soft kisses and soothing touches. They're both too tentative and too eager to please in turn, and Phil ends up grabbing Clint's wrist and pulling his hand away from his dick when he grabs it too roughly. 

"Hey," he says, looking into Clint's eyes, his face soft and sweet. "You don't have to try so hard." 

Clint nods, forcing himself to keep eye contact no matter how much he wants to look away. After a moment, Phil moves his hand down Clint's wrist to let their fingers entwine, and then moves his other hand to the back of Clint's neck. He squeezes, slightly, and Clint melts into him, relaxing his whole body. 

"I'm here," Phil says, pressing a kiss to the corner of Clint's mouth while he starts to recite their mantra. "I'm okay."

"I'm not going anywhere," Clint finishes softly, and then repeats it, stronger and louder and looking directly into Phil's eyes. "I'm not going anywhere." 

It's Phil's turn to nod, unable to say anything, and Clint has to lean forward and kiss him, kiss him with his eyes closed, pour everything he's ever wanted to say into that kiss. Phil kisses back, firm, like he's taking control, and Clint once again tries to overcome the urge to cry from relief, the feeling of familiarity something he's been chasing his whole life while never really believing he deserved to have it. Now, here, with love pouring in through the guise of a familiar kiss, he's starting to believe. 

"I love you," he says, and his voice breaks on the word, the tears falling unheeded from his eyes. "I love you I love you I love you." 

Phil kisses his wet cheek. "I know." 

-

It takes a little while, but they drift back into normal. It helps that Natasha is on an undercover assignment and not checking in regularly with either of them; by the time Clint's gone two months without hearing from her he's started to get used to not having her around, a dull ache in the back of his mind the only sign that something's different. He fills the void by spending most of his time in Phil's office, fooling with his arrows and reading over old missions and, one memorable night, trying to help Phil with his paperwork. After that, Phil must ask Fury to give them something, anything, for Clint to do, because suddenly he's out on mission after mission, intelligence gathering and brute force alike, and Clint would complain if he weren't so glad for the distraction. 

Weeks pass like that, with neither one of them mentioning the elephant in the room, though Clint knows, he _knows_ that Phil is keeping in touch with her regularly. Clint, for one, is grateful for the respite.

One day, Clint saunters into Phil's office after a debrief and immediately drops to the floor next to his desk, ostensibly to dig around in Phil's under-desk refrigerator for a beer but really to brush a hand down Phil's leg. This time, instead of shivering or sliding a hand into the neck of Clint's shirt, Phil just rests a hand on the back of his neck. Clint looks up at him.

"Natasha's back," he says, his face and voice completely flat, and Clint feels elated and terrified in equal measure - elated that his best friend is back, and terrified it's going to change his relationship with Phil somehow. 

"Do you think I should drop down on her from the rafters?" he asks, trying to defuse the tension. It works; Phil breaks into a smile and shakes his head. 

"If she weren't talking to Fury, I would whole-heartedly endorse that maneuver. However -" 

"Understood, sir," Clint says, returning to his original mission. He pulls out two beers and hands one to Phil, then uses his hand on Phil's inner thigh to push himself up. Phil groans and wraps a hand around Clint's wrist, locking him in place. Clint just looks at him for a second, and then he leans in, his other hand going to the back of Phil's chair. He kisses him softly, the exact opposite of how they've been kissing these past few months ("yes, I want _you_ , goddammit, just like I said before"). Instead, Clint's kiss is a quiet, gentle, _I'm not going anywhere._

There's a spark in Phil's eye when he pulls back, and Clint grins his cocky grin at him, takes his beer and collapses on the couch. "Do you remember when we first met?" 

Phil lets out a snort of laughter at the memory of Clint at 20 in the backseat of his car, handcuffed and wearing nothing but a loincloth, loudly proclaiming himself Tarzan, claiming that he needed his arrows to protect himself from rogue apes. Phil does a short impression of Clint-Tarzan, and then they're both laughing. 

They're still laughing and trading stories when Natasha shows up half an hour later, knocking and letting herself in simultaneously. She grabs Clint's beer right from his hand and settles on the couch, not right next to him but close enough that he can feel her presence, even when he's looking at Phil. It's nice and it feels normal, and Clint suddenly feels himself relax completely - he hadn't even realized he was still holding on to that tension - and settle into something new and old at the same time. 

-

They move Natasha into an apartment of her own choosing one weekend a few months later. She somehow ends up doing most of the heavy lifting, carrying three boxes when Clint and Phil each grab two, but they still manage to hoist all the furniture up four flights of stairs by themselves. Natasha yells " _Pi-VOT_!" at them exactly once while they're moving the couch, but their collective glare is enough to make her honest-to-God _giggle_ and disappear from their sight until they make it through the door. Phil collapses onto the couch and Clint collapses onto Phil, snaps his fingers and holds out his hand for the beer Nat slides in silently. She hands another one to Phil and then settles onto Clint's legs with a beer of her own. 

Everyone's quiet for a moment. Clint has his eyes closed, his head in Phil's lap, Natasha's knees steepled over his own, a cool beer pressed to his temple and the promise of pizza on its way - he's pretty sure he could stay like this forever. 

"You know," Natasha says slowly, "the couch is actually supposed to be on the other side of the room." 

Clint blinks, and then looks up into Phil's face. "It sure was nice knowing Nat, wasn't it?" 

"What?" Natasha asks.

"Agent Romanoff was surely one of the greats," Phil says sadly. 

"What?!" Natasha asks again, straightening her legs on top of Clint's knees and pushing down so he can't move. He grunts, quietly and quickly, and a normal person would never have noticed, so obviously Natasha's eyes get a little brighter and she smiles a tiny smile. 

"You see," Clint starts, trying to sit up to look at her but giving up and dropping his head back on Phil's lap. Phil takes the hint and picks up the sentence, but not before Natasha's smile gets a little bigger. 

"Inviting two Level 5 agents to move furniture is already a breach of security. But not telling them where the furniture has to go and making them move it later?" Phil shakes his head slowly. "There are rules one has to follow." 

"I see," Natasha says. She jumps up and scoots forward, dropping her body back onto Clint's with her ass on his knees. He grunts loudly, and tries to turn into Phil's body, but she has him pinned down. She's outright grinning now, as Phil absent-mindedly runs a hand through Clint's hair. "I wasn't aware of any rules, though." 

"Tough break," Phil says, shrugging. 

"Hmm," is all Natasha says, but she moves like she's going to lever her body up and back down on Clint's again, so he immediately rolls onto the floor. 

"I give!" he yells, jumping to his feet and wincing a little, his hands held up in surrender.

"You _give_?" Natasha says. "So easily?"

"Yeah, what she said," Phil says, pointing to her with his thumb. "I don't want to move this couch again, Barton." 

"Oh, we're not moving the couch, sir," Clint says. He gestures to Phil to scoot over, which he does, and then Clint drops back onto the couch, this time with Phil between him and Natasha. "I just wanted to move out of her range."

 She crosses her arms and scowls. 

"Oh. Well then. Good," Phil says.

The doorbell rings, and everyone perks up.

"Pizza!" Clint exclaims, and Natasha nods as she heads for the door. She stops before opening it and turns back to them. 

"Hmm, I don't think we'll be able to eat with the table where it is. If you boys wouldn't mind?" She gives them a small smile, one she gives to people she's tricked into underestimating her, and Clint would be angry if she weren't right - the kitchen table's shoved up against the wall, the couch is facing the wrong direction, and everything would be better if the couch were on the other side of the room. Clint sighs, gets up, and gestures for Phil to do the same.

"We're really moving it again?" Phil asks.

"She won," Clint says dully.

"Son of  a bitch," Phil says as they heave the couch into the opposite corner. This time when they collapse on it, Natasha says nothing but brings them pizza and beer. Halfway through the meal, Clint can't help but grin and crook an arm around Nat's neck, bringing her head to his mouth. He whispers, "I wouldn't do this for anyone but you. I'm proud of ya, kid," and lays a loud kiss on the top of her head before releasing her. She shoves him away, grinning, her cheeks tinted with red, and rolls her eyes at Phil, who rolls his back. Clint doesn't think he's ever loved two people more. 

-

They make it back to their place right before it gets dark, and Clint drops right onto the couch while Phil heads for the kitchen. 

"Hey, bring me a beer," he calls as he turns on the TV. 

"Get one yourself, lazy ass," Phil says, but he has two bottles with him when he joins Clint. He settles next to Clint with their shoulders overlapping, beers in opposite hands. 

"What are we watching?" 

Clint shrugs. "Wife Swap's on." 

Phil groans. "This shit is terrible, why do we watch this?" But he relaxes into Clint, and the two of them sit there as the sun sets and it gets dark around them, neither of them wanting to move and turn a light on. 

"Hey," Clint says about halfway through the second episode. He nudges Phil's shoulder with his own, and repeats himself. "Hey."

"Yes?" Phil asks, keeping his eyes on the screen, his lips quirking up the smallest bit.

"I really love you, you know." 

Phil turns to look at him then. "Yeah?"

Clint nods. "Yeah." 

An actual smile spreads over Phil's face, and Clint's heart feels like it grows three sizes, just like the goddamn Grinch. "I really love you too." 

"I _know_ , stop _stifling_ me." He's watching the screen again, an actual honest-to-God not-even-the-tiniest-bit-cocky grin on his face, so he doesn't see Phil's eye-roll but he knows it's happening. He turns back to Phil after a second. "Just kidding. Boy, that's nice to hear, huh?"

Phil rearranges himself so his arm's around Clint's waist, holding him flush against his body, so Clint feels it all over when he shrugs. "Eh, it's okay." 

Clint puts his head on Phil's shoulder, notching himself in just like a puzzle finding its last missing piece.

-

Their mission in Paris goes off without a hitch!

Except that, after Nat gets information from her mark and dead drops it, and Clint manages to get tracking devices on two targets (one from three hundred feet away, _thank you very much_ ), Phil grabs both of them less than half a block away from the safe house and leads them down no less than eleven twisting side streets (Clint counts) before stopping suddenly in the middle of a street that's basically an alley. 

Phil peels up the manhole cover next to them (Clint will always be amazed when he showcases just how strong he is, because he really doesn't do it often enough) and holds it up. 

"Well. Go on," he says, and Nat, who normally doesn't let stuff like this bother her, has the absolute  _best_ are-you-shitting-me look on her face. It's so good Clint almost forgets the fact that his boyfriend is trying to get him to jump who knows how far down into a  _sewer_. 

Phil's face goes hard and he says in his best agent voice, "Take cover. That's an order." 

Clint grimaces but puts his hands on either side of the hole and says, "Wish me luck!" He swings himself in and lets go when his body is hanging straight down; he's jumped from enough roofs that there's barely a jolt when he drops down fifteen feet with a splash. 

"Eighteen feet?" Phil asks, and Clint never would have thought that someone being able to gauge distances in low light would be so damn  _sexy_ , but Phil has honestly done nothing consistently but amaze him. 

"About fifteen," he calls up, and he thinks he can see Phil's silhouette nod against the sunlight streaming in. 

"Are you going to catch me, Hawkeye?" Nat asks, crouching over the hole so she's blocking the sun. 

"I got ya, Nat," he says, because if he's in a sewer, he's not using code names. 

She swings herself in much like he did, and he positions himself so that when she drops, she drops straight into his arms, though he grabs her around the thighs so she doesn't fall into the muck under them and splash them, which means he's very awkwardly looking at her torso for a moment. 

"Let me down," she says, hitting his shoulders, and he releases his hold on her just enough to grab her by the waist instead, and then lower her into the water. She feels  _nice_ under his hands, all soft curves instead of hard muscle, which is different from what he's usually holding onto (Phil) but in a good way; for a second, with their faces so close to each other, he thinks about leaning forward and kissing her, just to see what it would be like. 

"Everyone secure?" Phil calls down, and Clint snaps out of it, realizes he's on a mission and Natasha is his much younger partner and  _his boyfriend is watching them_. 

"Yes sir," he calls. "We're secure down here." 

"Good. Keep your comms on and don't stray too far. I'll be back." And with that, Phil drops the manhole cover back in place. 

Clint looks at Nat, his eyes still adjusting to the dark so all he can really make out is her shape. 

"What now?" she asks. He shrugs.

"We could explore? As long as we don't go too far." 

She nods, and then looks both ways down the tunnel surrounding them. She sighs. "This way, I guess." She points toward her left. 

"Ladies first," Clint says, half-bowing and sweeping an arm out in front of him. She glares so hard it practically _hurts_. "Ouch," he says, laughing. "If looks could kill. Guess I'll go first." He makes his way past her slowly, trying not to splash so much. He can hear when she starts following him, just barely - she's seriously like a ninja, it's crazy. He doesn't get how anyone could be walking through six inches of water without making noise - not that he's really trying to be quiet. 

He makes it about a hundred feet before he turns around to look at her, walking backwards and making even more noise, somehow. "Should we talk or something?"

"About what?" She doesn't look at him, instead watching her feet and delicately stepping through the water - she must be magic or something, _who does that_? 

"I dunno," he says, now staring off into the distance behind her. "Anything." 

She gives him a quick look like _go on_ , and then looks back at her feet. He sighs. 

"Okay. Um, what's your favorite TV show?"

"Really? _That's_ the question you pick?"

"What, are we playing Truth Or Dare or something? What do you want me to ask?"

"I don't know, ask me what a torturer could say to get state secrets out of me or something - which, by the way, is nothing. We're not teenage girls at a slumber party, Barton." 

" _Jesus_ Christ," Clint says, shaking his head. "Did you just reference being tortured and then call me a teenage girl?" 

"Of course I did. I'm pretty sure only teenage girls giggle at Hannah Montana jokes." 

"Hey! Her friend is really funny, okay?" He stops walking to point indignantly at Nat.

"Whatever you say, Clint." She pats him on the arm as she walks past him. "Stop pouting," she says without turning around.

"I'm _not_ pouting," he says, pulling his face out of a pout and following after her. They're quiet for another fifty feet, and then he says, "How far do you think we should go, anyway?"

She stops and sighs. "Honestly, I think I'm looking for a ladder or a ledge or something. I just want to get out of this water."

"You and me both, sister. Come on. I bet there's an intersection or something that'll have a place for us to sit down up here. But we gotta keep going!"

He moves past her again and doesn't look back, but he hears the quiet splashes start back up after a minute, and then:

"I do like that one episode where Lilly tries to sing." 

-

Phil pulls them out of the sewer six hours later, and never explains what happened to put them down there or get them back up. They're even not allowed in the debrief Phil sits through with Fury and, Clint suspects, the Council. 

They don't explain to Phil exactly how they ended up imitating Fat Albert to each other for half an hour on the plane ride home, giggling at each other, because even Clint's not sure how that happened. 

-

Natasha starts inviting Clint over to watch TV with her once a week. She invites Phil, too, the first couple of weeks, but he keeps begging off, and so it's just Clint and Natasha. It's nice, the two of them sitting around instead of sparring in the gym. It becomes a habit, and before long he starts crawling into the bed he shares with Phil in the dark, instead of making it home in time to go to sleep together. 

One night, Clint says, "I might have feelings for Natasha," into the dark silence of their room. He thinks Phil might be asleep (he _hopes_ it, more like), but he also knows he has to say it. "Emotional and...physical." 

After a minute, Phil just says, "Okay." 

He doesn't come with them on their next joint mission.

-

They tumble into and out of a firefight in Hungary very quickly. The next thing Clint knows, he’s wandering the streets, an _I heart Budapest_ sweatshirt pulled over his uniform vest, his paltry four arrows in a bag over Natasha’s shoulder, and his hand in hers. And then he’s standing in the lobby of a hotel, Natasha draped on his arm and giggling, repeating the Hungarian word for “honeymoon” in a flawless Midwestern American accent in his ear while he pretends to stumble his way through the Hungarian for “We need a room.” The woman at the front desk smiles at them, apologizes that the honeymoon suite is taken, and doesn’t bat an eye at their ridiculous attire and lack of suitcases.

Natasha drops his hand as soon as the doorway to the stairwell closes behind them, but Clint doesn’t really notice.  It’s started to come to his attention that the bullet he thought had passed right by him had actually grazed his abdomen. It comes to his attention because there’s a dark red spot on the side of his sweatshirt, and he thinks he might be dying a little bit as he makes his way up and around the twisting stairs. When they get to the room, Natasha heads right for the window, but Clint doesn’t make it next to her, though he tries. Instead, he collapses on the edge of the bed, peels his sweatshirt off carefully and then throws it somewhere on the floor, and starts unzipping his vest very slowly. He shrugs out of it and winces as it moves over the bullet wound, which on first glance doesn’t look so bad – at least, he seems to have stopped bleeding. He scratches a small flake of dried blood away from his wound, sighs, and suddenly has a lapful of Natasha. _Shirtless_ Natasha.

“Wha—“ is all he manages to get out, his hands on her soft, shapely thighs, before she’s kissing him, _licking_ him, her tongue in his mouth. He’s been thinking about this or something like it for a few months now, ever since he caught her body jumping into the sewer in Paris, and so it takes until her hand starts straying towards his dick for him to stop it.

“We can’t do this,” he gasps out, one hand wrapped around her tiny little wrist, one hand so tantalizingly close to her gorgeous breasts he can practically taste them.

“I’m not a child,” she says, rolling her hips and grazing his erection. He groans involuntarily and then decides, _fuck it_ , and kisses her. She smiles against his mouth, and he can tell she thinks she’s won, but _he’s_ the older one, goddammit, and he’s going to take charge. He grabs both of her wrists in one hand, pulling her hands away from where they’ve been fiddling with his belt, and wraps his other arm around her waist. He growls and nips at the tender skin on the underside of her chin before flipping them over, Natasha’s back against the bed.

The last time he slept with a woman – either a low-level agent or someone he picked up in a bar, not long after joining SHIELD, he can’t really remember – he worried whether he should be gentler or sweeter with her, all women seeming like fragile little flowers. It's one of the reasons he prefers sleeping with men, actually – rougher sex is much more his style.

With Natasha, though, he’s literally thrown her across rooms, seen her shrug off wounds that later took sixteen stitches to close up, so he doesn’t hesitate to pin her arms above her head and rest all his weight on her. She hates the loss of control; he can tell by the way she starts wriggling underneath him, but she’s doing it in a very pleasing way, so he doesn’t let go, just kisses her, deep enough that she seems to forget about it and sort of sinks into the bed. He grins, nips along her jaw until he gets to her earlobe, and then moves back to her mouth, his free hand sliding into the ridiculous _Budapest_ sweatpants she’s still wearing. When he slips a finger inside her, she makes a strangled noise against his mouth, and then breaks away, gasping, when he circles her clit with his thumb. 

"Are you going to come for me, sweetheart?" he asks, finally letting go of her wrists to rub his other thumb over her nipple. 

"Don't ruin it, jackass," she says, but she arches her back and pushes down on his hand on the same time, and he grins as he lowers his mouth to her breast. She gasps and writhes as he gently bites first one nipple, and then the other, her hands tangled in his hair. She pulls him up to kiss him again and almost bites his tongue off when he slips two more fingers inside her. 

"Fuck you," she gasps, pushing his face away from hers.

"I'm trying to," he says, his cockiest grin spreading across his face as he slowly drags his thumbnail across her clit, moving his fingers slowly in her.

That's it, she's gone - she tightens around his hand, gasps in his ear, and he pulls out of her slowly. She bites behind his ear before flipping them over so she's on top, a wicked grin on her face. 

She comes two more times before he does, and he falls asleep later thinking he agrees with his touristy sweatshirt - he does heart Budapest.

-

They fly home in a cargo plane the next day. It's practically cold on the flight, the plane not quite doing enough to warm them up, and Clint watches as Natasha drifts off to sleep, comfortable in the chill the way he can never be. He spent his childhood in the warm tents and train cars of a traveling circus stuffed to the gills with people and animals, while he imagines she spent her childhood sneaking through snow drifts, somehow managing to not leave footprints or make a sound. 

Her face is open when she sleeps, looking relaxed the way she almost never does awake - even goofing around in Coulson's office, she seems to be a bundle of coiled energy, waiting to strike. It's something Clint's noticed before, the trusting way she sleeps, all the times she's fallen asleep in his presence, but something is different, now. He's held that cheek in his hand, he's rested his forehead against hers, he's traced the three-inch scar from a knife wound on her abdomen with his tongue. He's seen her at her most vulnerable and open, even more so than when she sleeps. 

And, oh, God, he's betrayed his boyfriend, his lover, his _partner_ of six years, the longest relationship he's had with anything but his bow (his first love, which he suspects will last long after he's ruined all his relationships with people) for nothing more than Natasha's soft, seductive curves. 

Clint kind of hates himself right now, hates the soft way he's looking at Natasha, hates the way he kissed her while he was inside her, hates the way he knows exactly what her breast feels like in his hand, exactly what she looks like when she comes.

And he hates himself even more when he grabs her hand on their way out of the debrief back at headquarters and pulls her into a supply closet and fucks her against the wall.

-

They fuck all over the building, and it's always hard and fast except for the moment of orgasm, when he thinks he feels his heart swell with love for Natasha and he kisses her sweetly. 

He disgusts himself. 

He almost always goes home and gives Phil a blowjob, swears to himself he'll never do it again, and finds himself fucking Natasha again hours later.

It's fine, though. No one's caught them yet (there's _definitely_ something in the handbook about not fraternizing with fellow agents, especially when you're supposed to be at a meeting with Fury) and Clint is only slowly dying from guilt, so he figures he's got at least six more months of this before he explodes in a big guilt-splosion, so that's half a year before anyone finds out. 

At least, until he does the stupidest thing he could do, and forgets himself one day when ( _his boyfriend_ ) Phil steps out of his office and lets Natasha kiss him, right there on Phil's couch where Clint came in Phil's hand for the first time. Clint kind of forgets about that and slips a hand under Natasha's shirt and lightly scratches her back, which makes her bite his lower lip, and Clint's grinning and moving his hand towards her pants when he hears Phil sigh behind them. 

Immediately, Clint is across the room, leaning against Phil's desk, staring at the floor like a chastised child, which he kind of is. Natasha looks straight at Phil and tells him she doesn't have any feelings for Clint, how _could_ she, and Clint's heart breaks a little, just a tiny crack, and then right away he wants to punch himself - god, he's an _adulterer_ , and worse, one with _feelings_. 

"Agent Barton?" Phil says. Clint can feel his gaze on him, so he looks up, into Phil's eyes, and says, "I agree with everything Natasha said." 

Phil's gaze softens a little, and Clint thinks he can see a little upward quirk to his lips when he asks Natasha to leave them alone for a minute. 

"You're a dumbass, Barton," Phil says when she leaves, but there's affection in there - it sounds almost like he's trying not to laugh. 

"Sir?" Clint says, blinking. 

"In my office? Really?" Phil crowds into Clint's space, putting his hands on Clint's hips. He's starting to actually smile. Clint kind of can't believe his luck.

"Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking." 

Phil kisses Clint, and then reaches down and slaps his ass. "You weren't." He pulls away and heads for his desk chair and his ever-present paperwork. "Just like when you decided to go on a sex rampage all around the building." 

"You _knew_?" Clint almost chokes the words out.

"Please. You realize we're an espionage organization, right? You and Natasha have been the only gossip for weeks." 

"You knew and you didn't _care_?" 

"I was hoping you'd tell me, sooner or later." Phil gives Clint a look, and Clint shrinks into himself and falls onto the couch. "Anyway. You told me you had feelings for her months ago, I figured you'd sleep with her eventually."

"So...I can keep sleeping with her?" 

"As long as you promise to stop screwing in supply closets. Klowalski's getting tired of reorganizing all of them." 

"Okay," Clint says, dazed.

"And please, don't ever lie to me again - even by omission - unless it's a matter of national security."

"Yes, sir." 

" _And_ ," Phil says, walking over to Clint and grabbing the front of his shirt, forcing Clint to look him in the eyes, "always come back to me." 

Clint smiles slowly. "Yes, sir." 

Phil kisses him again, deep, and then sends him off. When Clint finds Natasha waiting for him outside Phil's office, he's so happy he wraps an arm around her neck and pulls her head to his chest. She tries to trip him, and he laughs, delighted. He's the luckiest dumbass there is. 

-

"Christ, Phil," Clint says, dropping Phil's hands and stepping away from him. "Spit it out already, would you?"

Phil sets his jaw and nods, staring off into the distance over Clint's shoulder. "Maybe not here?" he suggests, gaze flickering back to meet Clint's, and Clint waves an arm off the dance floor: _go ahead._

They're in Amsterdam, their sixth city in as many days. They're not even on some crazy mission; oh, no, it's much worse. 

They're on vacation. 

It's been a lot of tours around centuries-old cities and wandering "off the beaten track" and Phil showing off his many different language skills and it's just _exhausting_. Clint hasn't been in the rafters of a building in over a week, and Phil made him leave his arrows at home so he's felt perpetually naked and hasn't had the chance to shoot anything in days and honestly, it's a little weird to just be hanging out with Phil, all day every day. Like, Clint loves him, he knows he does, but he also loves the moment he first sees Phil's face after a long mission away, or the look Phil gives him across a full room during debriefs, or the quirk in his eyes when he wants to laugh at something someone else is saying but he can't. This is Phil holding his hand while walking down the street and speaking his mind whenever he wants and _always being there_ , right beside Clint, the only familiar face in every crowd. It's weird. 

It's also pretty great - yesterday they went out to lunch with another couple they met in their hotel, and Phil spent almost the entire time with a hand tangled in the hair at the base of Clint's head. _That_ was so great Clint blew him in the cafe bathroom before the check even showed up. 

Today, though, Phil's been stuttering and awkward and just plain off. They're at an amateur swing dancing club in Amsterdam that Clint found just for Phil; there was a quick tutorial right after dinner, and they've been supposed to be throwing each other around the dance floor for the past hour, but Phil's barely even trying, and it's not like this is something Clint would have picked out for _himself_ , but Phil only listens to big band music and once you get him started talking about the 40s he _won't shut up_ so it doesn't make any sense for him to be withdrawn, and it's finally gotten to Clint. 

Phil leads them off the dance floor and back to their table, where he sits and watches the dancers for a minute until Clint clears his throat, and then he looks directly at Clint and smiles. 

"Do you think we should get married?" he asks. 

"What?" Clint says kind of loudly. Did he misunderstand Phil over the music?

"Do you think we should get married?" Phil asks again, a little louder and slower, and Clint hears every word. 

"Are you...are you _asking_ me to marry you?" 

"No, I'm just wondering if it's something we should do," Phil says, turning back to the dance floor. He whistles and points to a couple. "Wow, they're really something, huh?" 

"Phil. Phil. Coulson!" 

Phil turns back to Clint. "Yes?" 

"Should we _talk_ about this more? Maybe we should go somewhere quieter? Is this why you've been acting weird all day? Oh, god, you don't have a ring, do you?" 

"No, I don't have a ring. Unless...do you want a ring?" 

"No, no, I definitely do not want a ring." 

"Oh." Phil kind of deflates, and Clint backtracks.

"I just think it'd be hard to wear. You know, it'd throw off my balance. With the...arrows," he finishes lamely, actually miming shooting an arrow.

"Oh. Yeah, that makes sense." Phil looks back out at the dancing couples, absent-mindedly tapping his left ring finger on the table. Clint's staring at it, he knows he is, but for some reason he keeps hearing the tapping noise a ring would be making, and he kind of wants that for Phil, that commitment - or at least, that _sign_ of commitment, because if there's one thing Clint knows for sure, it's that he will never leave Phil Coulson willingly. Hell, he's been sleeping with Natasha, hands down the hottest, scariest agent SHIELD has, for over a year, and yet every night he doesn't fall asleep next to Phil is a night he feels a little off. 

"We should probably register with HR as a couple first," Clint blurts. Phil turns back to him, stops tapping his ring finger, waits for Clint to go on. "I mean, before we get married. That's a thing people do, right?" 

The lines around Phil's eyes crinkle and he takes Clint's hand in his own. "Yeah, that's a thing. I was thinking we'd do this in secret, though." 

"Secret, huh? Secret is good." Clint rubs his thumb over the back of Phil's hand, tries to tamp down the memories of his "secret" fling with Natasha and focus instead on the here and now. 

"But we could definitely register as a couple, if you wanted to." 

"And _then_ we'll get married," Clint says forcefully. He doesn't know if Phil will actually talk to HR - who is even _in_ HR, is it Sitwell or someone or, holy shit, is it _Fury_? Clint can't really imagine Phil telling Fury they've been fucking for the better part of a decade, though he thinks he'd want to see it - but he knows he's going to marry Phil, whenever Phil wants. 

Phil smiles, wide and easy and so beautiful it takes Clint's breath away a little. "Yeah. Then we'll get married." 

Clint nods towards the dance floor, a matching smile on his face. "You wanna get back out there? Show these fuckers what we're made of?" 

Phil squeezes Clint's hand and leads him back out onto the dance floor. 

-

They don't immediately get married - actually, nothing about their relationship changes, except for the guilt that creeps over Clint every time he sleeps with Nat, or every time Phil taps his hand on his desk or rubs a thumb over where a ring would rest. 

Clint and Natasha are finishing up a mission in Switzerland (also known as taking a night to sleep in a real bed in a hotel before heading home) when Clint decides he can't really take it anymore and he's got to break up with her. He's been sitting in a chair next to the window for over an hour, staring at her sprawled on her stomach in bed, sheets falling off her naked body. She's so vulnerable when she sleeps, face so open and youthful, and he almost wants to wrap his arms around her and never let go, but he also knows that he's got to do this before he loses his nerve.

He slides into bed next to her, ghosts a hand over her smooth back before wrapping his fingers around her shoulder. 

Immediately she's on top of him, a knife held to his throat. 

"Jesus _Christ_ , Nat, what the hell are you doing?" He's holding his hands up near his shoulders, palms open in the classic "I'm unarmed" pose. 

She swiftly moves away from him, back onto her side of the bed, and the knife disappears. 

"Where the hell do you even _keep_ that thing?" he asks, but she merely raises an eyebrow. He feels like he's in the middle of a film noir, and his femme fatale should be blowing smoke into the room, a cigarette dangling from her fingers. After a minute, she sighs and relaxes, looks more like herself. 

"Did you wake me up for a reason, jack-ass?" 

"Oh, yeah." He squares his shoulders. "Listen, I've been thinking about this a lot, and I don't think we should sleep together anymore." 

She looks at him like she's expecting him to say something else. When he doesn't, she asks, "Is that it?" 

He shrugs. "Yeah, that's all I got." 

She takes a beat, nods, and then punches him in the shoulder. As he clutches it, trying to blink away the tears of pain that have appeared in his eyes, she turns away from him and lays back down. 

"That could have waited 'til morning," she says.

"Right," he forces out. God _damn_ that punch hurt. Maybe she was wearing brass knuckles that she hid near the knife? He thinks about asking her, but she's already asleep again.

She doesn't speak to him the entire flight home, but she kisses his cheek when they part ways after the debrief, and then never brings up the fact that they slept together ever again. 

-

"Heads up," Clint says, walking into Phil's office. Phil looks up and Clint tosses him a small bright blue box while barely looking at him and heading for the couch. Phil catches it automatically, looks at it, and looks at it again, blinking. Clint sits on the back of the couch, his feet on the couch cushions, and tries not to grin. 

"What's this?" Phil asks, holding the box up. 

"Open it." 

Phil pulls the white ribbon off and opens the hinged lid to reveal:

"I got you a ring." 

Phil pulls the platinum band out of the cushion and just stares at it. After a minute, he looks up at Clint and says, "What?"

"I got you a ring," Clint repeats, a little slower and louder. "For when we get married. I told you, I can't wear one 'cause it'll knock off my aim. But you should." 

Phil turns the ring over in his fingers a few times, watching as it catches the light. Clint watches the flashes play over Phil's face, and is hit by a rush of emotion that makes him slide down until he's sitting on the couch cushions, his feet on the floor. He'd stopped at Tiffany's after his debrief with Nat, buying the first ring to catch his eye, and now he's actually thinking about Phil wearing it, a symbol of their devotion to each other, and it's probably too sentimental but Clint might feel his heart twist with the need to see Phil with the ring on his finger. 

"So," Phil says, startling Clint out of his daze. "We're getting married." 

"I've stopped sleeping with Nat, so I really think we should." 

Phil smiles. They're finally at a point in their relationship where Clint can make a joke like that (even if it's not really a joke and they both know it, they're so nonchalant about it that it _feels_ like one) and Phil will smile and Clint has to actually tense his muscles so he doesn't slip into a kneeling position on the floor right there. 

Phil slips the ring back into the box and gets up, heading for Clint. "Okay," he says, settling onto Clint's lap, a knee on either side of Clint's hips, his hands on Clint's shoulders, "but I don't like you not wearing a ring. I want to mark you somehow, so everyone knows you're mine." 

Clint smirks and leans forward, biting Phil's earlobe lightly before practically growling in his ear, "I know one way you can mark me, sir." 

-

The first time Phil works with Tony Stark, Clint doesn't really know because he's on a string of missions with Natasha across Eurasia, watching in fascination as she slips into and out of a dozen different personas and slightly different accents, never seeing it closer than two stories away, perching on roofs with a bow in his hands. It feels a lot like when they were first starting out together, just the two of them against the world, and it's _fantastic_. 

Clint only sort of hears about Iron Man, bits and pieces in SHIELD chatter during downtime, but they replay the infamous "I am Iron Man" press conference approximately once an hour for two weeks after it occurs, so Clint sees it a million times on the way home. He mentions something about it in bed with Phil later, and Phil doesn't even look up from his paperwork to say, "Tony Stark has been nothing but trouble since the first day I was assigned to him." 

Clint looks at Phil in surprise, but Phil doesn't notice, so Clint lightly slaps his shoulder. "Really, Phil? You got to work with Tony Stark and _you didn't tell me_?" 

Phil looks over at him. "It was going to be a simple cover-up job before he opened his dumb mouth. I didn't think it was important enough to tell you." 

"Babe, it's _Tony Fucking Stark_. It's not like it was _important_ to tell me, but it's just plain _cool_. You didn't wanna brag?" 

Phil rolls his eyes. "No, I didn't wanna brag. I'm probably going to stay on Tony Stark detail, you want me to let you know everything I do?" 

Clint knows Phil's asking sarcastically, so there's definitely some sass in his voice when he says, "Yeah, I do. How hard was that?" 

Phil tries his hardest not to smile, but Clint purses his lips and raises his eyebrows and Phil laughs hard, leaning over and kissing Clint. 

"You're an idiot," he says, affection in his voice, Clint smirks, and Phil kisses the corner of his mouth, tongue ducking in when he opens it. 

"I love you, too," Clint says before kissing Phil back. 

-

Natasha gets assigned to track Iron Man about six months later, and Clint tries his hardest to keep his jealousy in check when she tells him while they're sprawled on the couch in Phil's office. Phil off-handedly mentions that Clint's not Stark's type (which, fuck him, Clint's _everybody's_ type) and that's why Clint's not going, but it's still pretty hard to make jokes with Nat, knowing she'll be working with Phil while Clint's off on his own. 

He doesn't really have abandonment issues, not with two partnerships hovering around the ten-year mark, but when he thinks about going home alone to his place and not being able to call Nat over to watch mindless sitcoms, he kind of wants to throw himself off a building. 

Of course, depending on the height, he'd most likely survive any falls, but still. 

He gets three separate solo missions while Phil and Natasha are in California, taking down targets in foreign countries. He tries his hardest to forget about his partners off together, instead concentrating on the tension in his bow, the feel of the arrow against his skin before he lets it fly. It works, a little, and when he gets home he spends a lot of time in the shooting range at SHIELD. 

Still, he's home one night when Phil calls him - _from Tony Stark's actual house_. Clint feels this is a little egregious, honestly - really, if anyone out of the three of them is gonna be friends with goddamn Iron Man and hanging out in his house, it's _absolutely_ him. 

"Exactly why you're not on this detail," Phil says when Clint mentions this to him. "Fury's got him on lockdown, which does not include any impromptu trips to Vegas." 

"Oh, Las Vegas with Tony Stark and his money. Can you _imagine_?" He gets lost for a few minutes in visions of high roller clubs and suites, setting down stacks of hundred dollar chips on a single roulette spin. When he picks the thread of conversation back up, Phil's saying something about the "land of enchantment."

"Wait, what?" Clint asks, and Phil sighs, but in a fond way that makes Clint grin. 

"I'm putting together a team for a mission in New Mexico, and I want you on it." 

" _You're_ putting together a team?" Clint asks, unable to keep the disbelief out of his voice. This is a _big deal_ : Phil's been on plenty of teams before, and has even led his fair share, but putting one together is usually reserved for the higher-ups. Maria Hill does it a lot, along with Nick Fury and some secret shadow-y figures Clint doesn't feel like knowing about. So for Phil to get asked is pretty phenomenal.

"Yep," Phil says, pride tinging his words. Clint can practically _hear_ him standing up straighter, and something swells in his chest. 

"Holy _shit,_ Phil, that's _fantastic_!" 

"Yeah, I thought so. So are you gonna come meet me out here or what?" 

"Of course I am, are you kidding me? But," he says, a thought hitting him, "I definitely think we should meet in Vegas and head to New Mexico from there." 

"Stark is not coming with me, Barton, and I'm pretty sure you don't make enough to be gambling." 

"That only matters if you lose, sir. But I'm not talking about gambling." 

"What else could you be - oh. _Oh_." 

Clint nods when he hears Phil get it. "Yeah, exactly." 

"Are you sure?" 

"Am I - I keep asking _you_ , Phil, of course I'm sure." 

"Okay. Okay then." He exhales loudly once, twice, a third time. "I've got to be in New Mexico tonight, but I'll meet you in Vegas tomorrow afternoon?" 

"And you'll be able to get away, being in charge and all?"

"Yeah, I'll just have Sitwell watch over things for the night. We can't spend long in Vegas, though." 

"No, I understand. We'll just spend a few hours, hop on a plane and get out of there." 

"Yeah, that sounds good. Okay," he says again, and Clint can hear him start to get distracted and think about other things. 

"So, I'll see you tomorrow. In the airport?" 

"Yeah, I'll coordinate times."

"Right. And sir?" 

"Yes, Barton?" Clint can hear Phil's smile.

"I love you. I'm happy." 

"I'm happy too," Phil says softly before hanging up.

-

They're sitting in the lobby of a wedding chapel just off the Strip, waiting for the couple ahead of them to finish up, when Phil looks up at Clint and says, "We can't do this." 

Clint looks up from his quiver, where he's been fiddling with the spare bow string in the pocket, winding it around and around his left ring finger. "This?" he asks, dropping the string. 

"We can't get married," Phil says, shaking his head. 

"That's what I was afraid you meant," Clint says, sighing. "We're not legally going to be married, you know. Elvis is just going to _say_ we're husband and husband." 

"No, I know that, but even if it's not legal it's still going to be _real_. And, well, doesn't it feel like someone's missing?" 

Clint wasn't going to say anything, but he'd felt a little off-center when just Phil came up to him at the airport, no silent-but-deadly redhead tagging along. He feels _off_ when he's alone, or when big things happen and only one of his partners is there to share. He's closer to Nat than he'd been yesterday, but she's still far enough away (and, you know, completely ignorant to his presence on this side of the country) that it definitely doesn't feel like she's there. 

"You're right," Clint says slowly, reaching out to slide his hand into Phil's. "This really shouldn't just be the two of us here." 

Phil nods. "Natasha should be here." 

"Natasha should be here." 

"So, we'll go? Head off and get back to work, maybe try this another time." 

"Yeah, that sounds good," Clint says. He stands, using the hand still holding Phil's to pull him up. They leave their application at the counter, nodding at the couple waiting behind them, and head back out to Phil's rental. 

"What exactly are we doing in New Mexico, anyway?" Clint asks as they get into the car. 

"I don't really know yet," Phil says. "There sure is something that looks an awful lot like the Norse god of thunder's hammer, though."

"Huh. That's kinda weird." 

"Eh. It's SHIELD." 

-

Clint plans on telling Nat he wants to marry Phil the very next time he sees her, but then Phil almost gets _blown up_ while they're in the fucking "land of enchantment," so really all he can do is kind of hold on to both of them, worried he'll lose them if he doesn't. Everything starts to feel tenuous, somehow, like their life-threatening fights are _actually_ life-threatening. When he mentions it to Phil, he says they're just getting old, but Clint's inclined to disagree - they're just getting higher-up and things are getting more real. Phil essentially becomes Fury's left-hand man (Hill remains Fury's right-hand man) and Clint gets assigned to hang out with Dr. Selvig all day, at times a tedious task but at least one they only trust to a more senior agent. 

There's a brief interruption to their daily routine when, one day, Phil gets a call from Fury and his face lights up in delight. Clint snaps a picture, and is immensely glad he did when Phil hangs up the phone to announce, "They just found Captain America. I have to pack for the Arctic Circle." 

Clint sends the picture to Nat, who's on a mission, and she comes back just in time to sit on the couch in Phil's office and laugh as Phil gets ready to pick up his life long hero from the ice. Clint literally has to hold Phil's trading cards so Phil stops packing and unpacking them, but he's still so nervous and excited that Clint can't hold back a chuckle at the look on his face. It's a pure, giddy _joy_ , and it spreads to Clint and Nat, and after Phil leaves they get slightly drunk and watch _My Two Dads_ in Nat's old room at HQ and laugh way too hard. 

When Phil gets back he sits next to Captain America's bedside pretty much non-stop until Clint finally can't take it anymore and he sneaks into the room in the middle of the night, gently slips his hand into Phil's, and leads him away. 

Things get back to as normal as they've ever been, the three of them working together and apart, meeting in Phil's office as often as they can. The last night they're all together, before Nat goes off to Russia on an undercover mission, she leaves them both with a kiss on the cheek, and when she's gone Clint looks over at Phil, his cheeks slightly red, and Phil says, "Let's get married when she gets back." 

Clint doesn't think he's ever been happier in his life. 

-

And then, his world collapses. 

-

"You have heart," a being from another world tells Clint, but he knows that's not true - he gave his heart away a long time ago. He sees their faces in his mind, Phil and Natasha, and then just like that, they're gone. 


End file.
